To some, whether they want to believe it or not, Science is its own religion.
Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science..
Yet, even a lot of those theories that explain those workings were discovered by deeply religious people. Even though the religion they were devouted to tried to kill them eg Copernicus, Galileo, and Galen.
Wrong.
You're a Physicians Assistant, right?
Are you not a proponent of evidenced based medicine? Or do you just go off of random assertions?
Science doesn't go off of one book written 2000 years ago and assume its inerrancy. It sometimes gets things wrong and changes them. Thank Zeus for the wisdom to do even that. I guess the process of peer-review and revision is now a weakness?
Oh and you don't get to escape with the "whether they believe it or not" and refuse to actually prove that assertion. We're not playing that game today. You say something and back it up, or you say nothing at all. You're better than that.
Mind you, Copernicus, Galileo, and Galen...and hell even NEWTON were "religious" you miss the nuance in their arguments.
For Copernicus and Galileo and even Pascal, religion did not answer the questions in the realms of their discovery. Pressure wasn't some mystical force to pascal. Geocentrism orbit wasn't the hand of god in Galileo's eyes.
Newton's religious views had changed REMARKABLY by the time he died. Granted, he was still tinkering with forms of alchemy that were debunked after his death, that didn't invalidate his work elsewhere. Additionally, if you've actually read about Newton, you'd know that with each of his discoveries, he got REALLY nervous because he knew he was encroaching on "god" because he knew god couldn't be used to explain things he knew to be better described otherwise. He also experimented with other forms of christianity that might even be called paganism occultism...merely attempts for him to reconcile his
desire to believe, rather than for these things to actually be true. His writings near his death almost painted him as a heretic at his time of death.
EVEN FURTHER, if you were a non-believer before the enlightenment (almost machiallelian) then you were just risking it because you really had NO idea. We didn't know enough to justifiably say that we were comfortable in debunking the claims of religion. Most people were just culturally religious in the sense that they identified with it as much as they do with their favorite sports team...not to mention, non-believers were killed...BUT most of the funding for "science" (a term thats relatively new) came from places with all the money i.e. formalized religious institutions like churches and monarchs. Around the time of the industrial revolution, you've got a bunch of atheists coming out basically saying "god is dead and we killed him." Essentially meaning that we finally understood enough about the world to debunk the claims for organized religions in just about, if not all, forms. Our rate of discovery in the past 200 years unveiled the darkness of thousands of years of ignorance about the universe in ways that religion no longer had answers for.
But you neglect to remember how you use Arabic numbers and muslims did work for algebra...does that mean Allah is then a viable proposition?
I don't recall the desire to uncover the the theory of relativity and provide applications for it being equivalent to a "religion" any more than I do the design of a car to travel across the country as a religion.